It’s kind of refreshing to have a brother talking about actual SRS and how important it is to him.

Just like it rocked my world to read Max Wolf Valerio’s memoir and hear some real honesty about the effects of taking hormones.

I get tired of having the physical dismissed. Especially when self-proclaimed trans-men are giving birth to children. Which is doubly offensive since transsexual and transgender women are told they aren’t really women since they can’t give birth to children.

‘There’s different ways to do the surgery, from real basic to more and more options. It’s like a car.’

By Erik Hedegaard

January 5, 2012

As you know, Chaz Bono, 42, has been through some changes lately. He started off as a girl named Chastity, the sole offspring of singers Cher and Sonny Bono; appeared on their TV show in the mid-Seventies as a cute little girl with curly locks, waving at the audience; came out as a lesbian in 1995; reconsidered her sexual identity a few years later; started testosterone treatments to become a dude; got a mastectomy to remove her breasts; started lifting weights; can presently curl 25 pounds with each hand; started going shirtless as often as he could, because, damn it, he was a man now and he could; got on the Dancing With the Stars TV program; was variously called a basketball, a penguin and an Ewok; got booted off after six weeks; has continued to stay in the news, what with Warren Beatty’s transgender son calling him a misogynist and him proposing to his girlfriend, Jennifer Elia, 36, atop the Seattle Space Needle, and then breaking up with her in December. It’s enough to make your head spin. What’s not generally known, however, is that, ever since the end of DWTS, Chaz has been studying his finances, adding up the credits and debits, and is pretty sure that within a short while he will finally be able to afford to get himself a penis.

He says he’s never felt better. He no longer numbs himself with painkillers and booze, for instance, and he no longer loses himself for days at a time in video games, though he still likes to play them. He has stopped smoking, too; it was quite an ordeal, until he learned of a certain frightening possibility if he continued.

“The way I had my top surgery done,” he says, “they take your nipples off, and from your old nipples, they make male nipples. They totally re-craft them, let’s say, and then they graft them back on. So it’s a graft, and grafts don’t always heal, and then this transgender guy that my girlfriend met said, ‘I know people who were smokers whose nipples have fallen off.’ When she told me that, that was all the incentive I needed. I went cold turkey.”

In 2002, Tina and I were living on Long Island. We read The New York Times daily. It wasn’t Fox News that led us to believe we needed to support Bush Jr.’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, it was the New York Times.

Later I remembered how when I was a teenager, the Times was all gung-ho about the War in Vietnam… At least until the Tet Offensive, My-Lai and photos of ARVN Generals blowing people’s brains out or napalmed little girls running naked down the road started appearing.

I’m not a fan of Iran’s government, nor the way they treat women, but if that was the criteria for going to war we would be at war with all of the Middle East, and major portions of Africa.

I’m also tired of having America sucked into conflicts on the side of Israel, a state that has become increasingly right wing and fascist since the 1980s. I strongly suspect our support for Israel in these matters is just a disguise for our wanting to wage neo-colonial wars in support of the oil industry.

By the way President Chimpy and his band of lying “Intelligence” scum ran the same bullshit by us regarding Saddam Hussein. Do they really fucking think our short term memory is so bad that we would forget this shit in a mere ten years?

So cut the fucking crap.

No War. No Blood for Oil.

It’s deja vu all over again. AIPAC is trying to trick America into another catastrophic war with a Middle Eastern country on behalf of the Likud Party’s colonial ambitions, and the New York Times is lying about allegations that said country is developing “weapons of mass destruction.”

In an article attributed to Steven Erlanger on January 4 (“Europe Takes Bold Step Toward a Ban on Iranian Oil “), this paragraph appeared:

The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran’s nuclear program has a military objective, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign. [my emphasis]

The claim that there is “a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran’s nuclear program has a military objective” is a lie.

But the IAEA report does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it is building one, only that its multiyear effort pursuing nuclear technology is sophisticated and broad enough that it could be consistent with building a bomb.

Indeed, if you try now to find the offending paragraph on the New York Times website, you can’t. They took it down. But there is no note, like there is supposed to be, acknowledging that they changed the article, and that there was something wrong with it before. Sneaky, huh?

Abstinence-only education creates a petri dish for bullying in schools. There is always a lot of back and forth about the efficacy of these programs, and I fall on the side that they demonstrably fail to reduce teen pregnancy, the rate of incidence of teen sex, or the transmission of sexutally transmitted infections (STIs) (all you have to do is look at Texas). In addition, however, I believe that the heyday of our federal investment in abstinence-only programs had a terrible collateral effect — namely, kids who were “educated” in this way were more likely to bully and harass because they learned, in ways integral to abstinence provisions, outdated “traditional” ideas about gender and sexuality. Even kids whose parents talked to them at home, about contraception or healthy sex, were taught gendered rules and more and more of them appear to have enforced those rules to great harm.

To be clear, I am not saying teaching abstinence is the problem. But, teaching abstinence in the context of fully comprehensive, age-appropriate sex ed is qualitatively different from teaching abstinence-only. This is the problem. I am saying that there is something inherently harmful about cultures that insist on abstinence-only teaching.

From 1982 until 2010 funding for abstinence-only programs grew exponentially, from $4 million dollars in 1982 to $176 million in 2007. According to The Department of Health and Human Services, during almost the exact same period, 2001-2008, there was a steady rise of bullying at schools. Fourteen percent of students, ages 12 through 18 reported being bullied during school in 2001, a proportion that more than doubled, to 32 percent, in 2007. Some of the bullying increase might be attributable to better recognition and reporting, but I think that the almost straight line correlation in growth trends during that same period is interesting. A correlation is not necessarily a causation, but here is why I think that there is an intimate dynamic between the two trends:

BASTROP — Near a glade of blackened pines, a Ph.D. student at Texas State University used microchip technology to search for an endangered Houston toad. Her device beeped as she held it over a carpet of pine needles, and after a bit of digging, a live toad emerged, half-buried in dirt.

The creature was waiting for warmer, wetter weather before mating, but its species’ future is grim. The huge wildfires that swept through Bastrop County last fall may wipe it out.

“That was an extinction-level event,” said Michael Forstner, a Texas State biology professor who is overseeing the toad research.

But if the Houston toad becomes extinct and falls off of the federal endangered and threatened species list, plenty of other species are waiting to get on it. More than 20 statewide, including several types of salamanders and snails, are under serious consideration for an endangered listing over the next four years, and dozens more are in the early stages of the process, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Altogether, the agency is reviewing the status of 96 species in Texas as of Nov. 1. Experts call this an unprecedented flurry of activity.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Texas Comptroller Susan Combs said in an interview this week. Her agency says even more species are under watch, including some from the National Marine Fisheries Service. The list of endangered species candidates is “very, very fluid,” she said, and could expand.